Thursday, September 21, 2006

Heckuva Job, Harry

This is horrible.

The substance of the Geneva Conventions "compromise" is going to be the stuff of nightmares. And good luck to the Dem leadership selling this as an instance of Rubber Stamp Republicans caving and going along with Bush!

By sitting on the sidelines throughout this whole piece of Kabuki, our national Dem pols let the GOP frame crystalize: this was Courageous Rebel Republicans led by Straight Talking Maverick Saint John McCain standing up to the Bush White House. And the story isn't going to come out "McCain Caved"... it's going to be "Fearless Saint McCain Stared Bush Down".

Just yesterday, Harry Reid told the AP that the Dem leadership was "sitting on the sidelines watching the GOP catfights." Having called the debate about whether Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions should be edited by Bush a "catfight", how is our Dem leadership now supposed to argue that McCain caved on a matter of supreme importance? Having decided to sit on the sidelines as if this was just all a process story about intra-GOP squabbling, they just can't do it. Can they argue that the whole debate was phony, that this was all Kabuki? Well, they could have argued that... LAST WEEK! But that ship has sailed.

I want the Dems to win the House back so badly it physically hurts. Judging by the lunacy coming out of the White House and the op-ed pages of our major newspapers, it looks like winning the House back is literally the only way to prevent a new war with Iran, let alone wind down the one in Iraq. But the Dem leadership has got to shake off this stupor they're in and get in the game.

The war for control of the House isn't lost -- far from it. The odds are we'll win. But there's no way we should be saying "Heckuva job, Brownie" to Reid, Pelosi and Emmanuel for this. By hiding under the bed and letting the GOP run this play unopposed, they blew this battle BIGTIME.